In 1909, Rutherford describe the atom as a proton-neutron nucleus around which electrons orbited as planets orbit the sun. Yet matter particles doing this would occasionally collide, but electrons never do. An atom of lead that has 82 electrons whizzing around in close proximity is stable for billions of years, so why don’t they collide? And a particle in orbit is accelerating, so it should lose energy and spiral inwards, but again electrons never do this. Are the laws of particles different for electrons in an atom?
The standard model handles this by letting virtual photons shield electrons from the nuclear attraction, but why then do they stay in orbit? It also lets an electron be a particle in space and a wave in an atom, by the miracle of wave-particle duality. A particle isn’t a wave, nor is a wave a particle, but this lets us use different equations for electrons in orbit and in space. Yet how does the electron know to be a particle in one place and a wave in another?
Apparently, electrons know Pauli’s exclusion principle, that they can overlap like waves if they have different quantum numbers. These numbers let electrons co-exist in atomic orbits, but they aren’t based on, or compatible with, any other physical laws. It is a classic case of science operating in reverse, as quantum numbers were invented after the fact.
The electron photon structure proposed earlier paints a different picture. It describes electrons as one-dimensional matter, that is matter-like on one dimension but light-like on the other two, so its matter dimension is why it moves slower than light in space. But on a two-dimensional surface, like the sphere around an atom, it can be like light, entirely wavelike. A particle orbiting a center needs an agent to stop it falling in, but wave can pulse forever on a circumference that is its wavelength, and it can’t spiral in because its wavelength needs that orbit circumference. It follows that if electrons around an atom vibrate at different wavelengths, they will never collide (see 4.6.3 next).
An electron matter-light hybrid can be a particle in space and a wave in an atom without miracles. It then moves slower than light in space but pulsates in atoms at the speed of light.